The executive director of the fact-checking site PolitiFact ripped Meta owner Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday after the billionaire tech boss announced that his platforms would end fact-checking.
In an X post, Aaron Sharockman condemned Zuckerberg’s decision to end its partnership with independent fact-checkers and the company’s accusation that these fact-checkers showed political bias when assessing posts on Meta platforms.
“If Meta is upset it created a tool to censor, it should look in the mirror,” Sharockman said in a statement he posted on X following Zuckerberg’s announcement.
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In a video posted to X on Tuesday morning, Zuckerberg declared, “We’re going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies and restoring free expression on our platforms. More specifically, we’re going to get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with Community Notes similar to X, starting in the U.S.”
For years, Meta’s platforms – including Facebook and Instagram – have employed journalists from PolitiFact and other outlets to fact-check and provide context to posts shared there.
Meta’s chief global affairs officer, Joel Kaplan, told Fox News Channel’s “Fox & Friends” on Tuesday that Meta turned “to independent, third-party fact-checkers” like PolitiFact, but since realized they are too biased. PolitiFact has long weathered accusations it leans left in its articles.
“It has become clear there is too much political bias in what they choose to fact-check because, basically, they get to fact-check whatever they see on the platform,” Kaplan said on Tuesday.
As Zuckerberg claimed in his video, Kaplan shared that Meta is ending the fact-checking project “completely” and replacing it with a “Community Notes” model similar to the one used on X, where ordinary accounts can contribute context and fact-checks to posts.
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“Instead of going to some so-called expert, it instead relies on the community and the people on the platform to provide their own commentary to something that they’ve read,” Kaplan added.
Sharockman fumed, “The decision to remove independent journalists from Facebook’s content moderation program in the United States has nothing to do with free speech or censorship. Mark Zuckerberg’s decision could not be less subtle.”
He threw back Zuckerberg’s accusation of political bias, stating that Meta’s platforms, not the fact-checkers, were the entities that actually censored posts.
“Let me be clear: the decision to remove or penalize a post or account is made by Meta and Facebook, not fact-checkers. They created the rules,” Sharockman said.
Elsewhere, he argued that Meta should create a space on its platforms where independent fact-checkers can “provide additional information and speech to users looking to understand the entire picture behind posts.”
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“You can see all of our work online at politifact.com,” he added. “We don’t use anonymous sources, and we provided a bibliography of sorts to all the information we consulted. When we make an error, there is a process to correct those mistakes. And there’s also a process to make sure Facebook and Meta receive the corrected information.”
In the caption to his statement, he added, “.@PolitiFact will have more to say on this. But these are my thoughts. This decision has nothing to do with free speech or censorship. (PolitiFact is an original partner and has been working on this project for 8+ years).”
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